Stretch

When the world becomes too fast and difficult he raises his voice to a squeaky falsetto and tells me between tweets that he is my baby bird. I am to make a nest for us with blankets and pillows and become his mommy bird, and as soon as I'm finished he snuggles down under my wing.

When did he get so old that he needed a game's permission to let me wrap my arms around him?

And the only thing more wonderful/terrifying than the transformation from soft baby to scab-kneed boy that he has just completed is the transformation from boy to man that is soon to come.

We ache. The both of us.

I'm finding that invisible bonds tear even more piercing than skin- and as ours stretch my hands brush the scars of that previous stretching. This journey is longer and more painful than that nine month one, these bonds so much stronger then flesh. And every day I find that motherhood is something that will never be finished with me; that elasticity is a goal I will never quite reach.

I rip.

I tell myself that in many ways the years that Zeke and I are about to embark on are the comfortable second trimester. Not the exhaustion and adjustment of the first; not the heavy awkwardness of the third. We have a long second trimester up ahead to learn what we never learned in that pre-journey, those nine months when we lived like one and refused to separate at 40, 41, 42, 43 weeks, until the doctors had to come in with their drugs and their tools and pull him from my womb...

-how to let go.

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And by the way, if you are in the mood to see and hear me instead of just read my words, here is a link to my Listen To Your Mother performance.

"The best things in life are nearest: Breath in your nostrils, light in your eyes, flowers at your feet, duties at your hand, the path of right just before you. Then do not grasp at the stars, but do life’s plain, common work as it comes, certain that daily duties and daily bread are the sweetest things in life". ~Robert Louis Stevenson